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Sunday, October 31, 2010

POV: FP Magazine: Talibanistan

Foreign Policy Magazine has featured an interesting photo/graphical essay on the war in Afghanistan. It's titled Inside Talibanistan, and effectively makes the point that our "enemies" are not a monolithic entity, but a combination of disjointed groups with different agendas and ideologies.According to our media and politicians, who have the talent of diminishing everything down to simplistic terms...

For the week starting Monday November 1, the following posts are in the pipeline:1. A photographer's lovely portraits of Sadhus attending the Kumbh Mela earlier this year.2. A interesting web documentary (multimedia) on the drought conditions facing East Africa.3. The work of a photographer documenting musicians of the Mississippi Delta...with my kind of music...really hard core Blues. It was...

El Rey: East Los Angeles' Mariachis

This is a delightful short documentary featuring Mariachis musicians in East Los Angeles produced by Drea Cooper and Zackary Canepari. The piece features Mariachi musicians who gather on corners of the streets of East Los Angeles looking for work, whether in birthday parties, in cafes, restaurants, quinceañeras, weddings and the like.To my delight, the main singer belts outs out the famous Mexican song "Volver Volver", initially without the accompaniment...

France Television: Portraits Of A New World

Here's a superb multimedia presentation guaranteed to knock your socks off.It's part of a collection of 24 multimedia documentaries produced by France Télévisions. Portraits Of A New World is a narrative of the world of the 21st century, and the upheavals which transform and influence our destinies.Unfortunately, it's only in French with no subtitles, which sadly reduces its internationalization and...

I've decided to self-publish a book of my photographs of Bali. I've hesitated for a long time, since I have no patience to fiddle endlessly with layouts, fonts and the myriad of other variables necessary to produce a book, but I recently discovered that Blurb has introduced a new interface called Bookify. This is essentially a tool for people like me who don't have the mindset to spend hours on a...

Masr: Javier Morgade

Masr is the Arabic word for Egypt...and it's also colloquially used for Cairo. So in Arabic, Egyptians are called Masr'yeen...which is confusing for non-Arabic speakers, but that's how it is. Egypt was borrowed from the Latin Aegyptus and from the ancient Greek Aígyptos. Javier Morgade was filming in Egypt for an airline company, and was left with surplus footage for this short movie. It's a documentary made with a Canon 5d Mark II and a Glidetrack...

Charlotte Rush Bailey joined my Tribes of Rajasthan & Gujarat Photo-Expedition ™ earlier this year, and has just published her photo book titled Kutch Classic: Portraits from Northern Gujarat of her photographs made on that trip, which is a wonderful visual compendium of this magnificent region of India.The book is full of photographs of Kutch tribals; most are portraits, some processed in the...

LCD Viewfinder (Meike)

One of the accessories I decided to get for both my Canon 5D Mark II and the new Canon 7D is a LCD viewer. which would be handy whenever I wanted to shoot video on either of these cameras. Having looked at the B&H et al, I had the choice between the LCDVF at $170 or the much more expensive Zacuto Jr at $252, but thought these prices were too high for an add-on I would not use frequently. Some...

Christian Bobst: Tibetans In India

Photo © Christian Bobst - All Rights ReservedChristian Bobst is a Swiss photographer based in Zürich who originally studied graphic design, and became interested in documentary photography. While working for advertising agencies, he won several national and international advertising awards. At this time, he works as a freelance art and creative director as well as a documentary photographer.Dharamsala,...

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy - All Rights ReservedHere's an environmental portrait of a Tibetan matriarch in one of the alleys of Dharmasala in northern India. It's been over 5 years ago since I've been to Dharamsala, and my photographic style has evolved noticeably. I would have photographed this woman differently now. She would have been most certainly less rigid, and I would have spent much more time...

Beatrix Jourdan: Clash of the Titans

Photo © Beatrix Jourdan-All Rights ReservedHere's somewhat of a change of gear from the norm for The Travel Photographer blog, and is about Laamb, which is Senegalese wrestling and a type of folk wrestling practiced in Senegal. It allows blows with the hands, the only of the West African wrestling traditions to do so.Beatrix Jourdan (Bea Mészöly) is a Hungarian-born photographer currently based in...

Rodrigo Cruz: Women Warriors

Photo © Rodrigo Cruz-All Rights ReservedThe reason I go out onto the streets with my camera is simple: I want to tell people's stories in an intimate way through powerful imagery. -Roberto CruzRodrigo Cruz is a freelance photographer with a particular interest in abuses of human rights, especially against women and children in his native Mexico. His work was published by National Geographic and The...

For the week starting Monday October 25, I planned posts on:1. A photo essay on the Tibetans living in India, that was supposed to be on last week.2. A remarkable web documentary (multimedia) on China that will leave you speechless.3. A short movie on Egypt made on a Canon 5D MarkII...very well done.4. The work of a photographer documenting musicians of the Mississippi Delta...with my kind of music...really...

Khaled Hasan: Death of Dreams

Photo © Khaled Hasan-All Rights ReservedKhaled Hasan is a Bangladeshi freelance photographer, whose work appeared in several daily newspapers in Bangladesh and international Magazines, such as Sunday Times Magazine, American Photo, National Geographic Society, Better Photography, Saudi Aramco World Magazine, Guardian, Telegraph, The Independent and The New Internationalist.He was awarded the 2008...

Following my earlier post on my handwritten storyboard doodles I used for one of my audio-slideshows, I thought I'd prep one that looked a little more sophisticated, and could serve as a template. The templates I found on the internets were not exactly what I wanted, so I basically created one using an existing Excel template.So here's The Travel Photographer's exclusive storyboard template (PDF)...

Xiaomei Chen: Puzhu

Photo © Xiaomei Chen-All Rights ReservedHands in Chinese Hakka culture are often a metaphor for the ability to work and survive; a symbol for diligence. "If you have hands, you never beg" the Hakka say.And so reads a caption under one of Xiaomei Chen's photographs in her Puzhu gallery.Xiaomei Chen had to choose between a Phd and a camera, and the camera won. Since 2006, she has been documenting human...

Here's a statement which could irk all the Libertarians and Tea-Party grumblers: I had an excellent experience with the US State Department's Passport renewal process! Yes, a government office!I had to renew my soon-to-expire passport, and I decided to jump the gun a month or two earlier than necessary.I wanted my old one back as it still has a number of valid visas....and as I suffer from acute separation...

Well, Apple's announcement that it added two MacBook Air laptops is immensely welcome as it provides an embarrassment of choices to its ever expanding fan base.I am especially excited by the 11-inch MacBook Air, which measures 11.8 inches by 7.56 inches, and weighs only 2.3 lbs. The 64gb flash memory model starts at $999 and would be ideal as a travel laptop for photographers. Couple it with an external...

Robert van Koesveld: Bhutan

Robert van Koesveld is a retired psychotherapist living in Perth, Australia. His biography tells us that he delights in meeting with people from all walks of life, and describes as travel's best moments as those in which he encounters these people.Robert is also about to publish his book Bhutan Heartland, (Fremantle Press, October 2010) which he produced with his wife, Libby Lloyd. You can also watch the Bhutan Circumambulation video in large QT...

Andrea Johnson: Burma

Andrea Johnson is a photojournalist specializing in documenting the wine and spirits, food, and travel industries. Her photographs regularly appear in related publications such as Wine Spectator, Food and Wine, VIA, Northwest Palate, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Additionally, Andrea has photographed three books: Passion for Pinot (Ten Speed Press, 2008), Essential Wines and Wineries of the Pacific Northwest,...

Theodore Kaye: Theyyam Dancers

Photo © Theodore Kaye-All Rights ReservedTheodore Kaye grew up in China, India and Indonesia. While majoring in Film, he studied also Uzbek and Farsi and worked as a newspaper editor and mountain guide in Central Asia.Subsequently he was a staff photographer at Rhythms Monthly, a Chinese-language geographic magazine, and covered stories in India, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Taiwan, Japan, Ireland and Great...

I've converted a number of my audio slideshows to mp4 movies, which are also iPad-compatible, and grouped them in a Vimeo channel. The channel is (obviously) called The Travel Photographer Channel....so this is a heads-up for TTP's readers to drop by and comment or "like" or whatever.I prefer Vimeo to YouTube...I think its quality is better, and it seems to be more "serious" in its inventory of m...

The 2010 Angkor Photo Festival is to be held between November 20 to November 27 in Siem Reap, Cambodia. The event is a unique photo festival in South East Asia, and it's now in its 6th iteration, having had its inaugural gathering in 2005.In 2010, 110 photographers including 50 Asian photographers are showcasing their work, in keeping with festival’s mission of highlighting emerging Southeast...

Next Week on The Travel Photographer

Phew! I got Walter Astrada's Undesired in after all! I'm glad I did...what a compelling piece of multimedia!!!For the week starting Monday October 18, I have posts on:1. A movie by a travel photographer on religious circumbulation in Bhutan.2. The work of a Mexican photographer featuring photo essays on Women Warriors and La Santa Muerte. 3. A short movie by a travel photographer on her travel in...

Walter Astrada: Undesired

"Fear is contagious, but courage is also contagious" - Ruchira Gupta Here's an extremely well done production (click the image) by MediaStorm of the remarkable work by photojournalist Walter Astrada. It deals with the issue of Indian women having to face immense cultural pressures to bear a son. This arises from the belief that males earn money while females do not, and are financial burdens on their families due to the tradition of dowry payment.The...

Gary Knight: New Website

Photo © Gary Knight-All Rights ReservedGary Knight has recently launched his personal website, appropriately titled Gary Knight Photography which features his portfolios, workshops, multimedia (soon) and his current academic involvement in Tufts and Harvard universities.Gary Knight started working as a photographer in Southeast Asia during the 1980s at at the time when its countries were slowly recovering...

Photo © Alia Refaat-All Rights ReservedHere are work samples from Alia Refaat, the final participant in the Bali: Island of Odalan Photo~Expedition ™ . It is Alia's second travel photography expedition, and she plans a series of exhibitions in Cairo of her photographs.Alia is a commercial photographer from Cairo, Egypt. Alia studied Mass Communications, and trained at Spéos Paris in commercial, portrait...

My Work: Old Delhi's Khari Baoli

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights ReservedKhari Baoli is reputed to be one of Asia's largest wholesale spice market, and is accessible from Chandni Chowk Road in the heart of Old Delhi. It's one of my favorite haunts whenever I'm in Delhi, and it's a wonderful area for some serious street photography. Of course, going there is also an excuse to stop by Kareem's for its famed kebabs.Photo © Tewfic...

MediaStorm For CFR: Pakistan

Here's Crisis Guide: Pakistan (click on image), a magisterial multimedia production featured by The Council of Foreign Relations and produced by MediaStorm. As we all know, Pakistan is critical, if not the most critical country, to the national interests of the United States, and yet it's misunderstood and viewed through a prism of apprehension and, from some quarters, of distrust.The concern over...

My Work: Traversing The Kachchh Part Two

I've uploaded around two dozen of new photographs unto a still gallery titled Traversing The Kachchh Part Two. These photographs were made during my Tribes of South Rajasthan & Kutch Photo~Expedition ™ earlier this year.As the title suggests, this is the second of my still galleries of photographs made in that area; the first was Traversing The Kachchh.Both galleries are precursors to my forthcoming...

Rich-Joseph Facun is a documentary, lifestyle, travel, commercial, editorial and portrait photographer based in the United Arab Emirates. He recently published a personal project titled Darshana Ganga which documents the daily life, culture and heritage along the Ganges River over a number of trips to India. The latest trip saw him in Haridwar, an important pilgrimage city, Rishikesh, the yoga capital...

I've finally decided to replace my trusted and loyal (but ageing) Canon 1D Mark II with a Canon 7D. I hummed and hawed about whether to get the Canon 1D Mark IV, but balked at its price ($4900ish) and its weight....I thought of getting a second Canon 5D Mark II but wanted a much faster fps rate...and seeing a Canon instant rebate of $100 on the 7D, I jumped at it and now have it.Well, I should say...

Hamid Sardar: Mongolia

Hamid Sardar-Afkhami is a photographer and a scholar of Tibetan and Mongol languages with a Ph.D. from Harvard University. After moving to Nepal in the late 1980’s and exploring Tibet and the Himalayas for more than a decade, he traveled to Outer Mongolia, and determined to document its nomadic culture by setting a mobile studio ger camp in Mongolia. With his arsenal of cameras and different formats,...

Planning a multimedia photo essay or audio slideshow needs a sort of bird's eye view of the project as a whole, and that's what storyboards are essentially supposed to do. Storyboards help to pre-visualizing the photo essay's sequencing, and act as blueprints for the project.The above photo shows my rather elementary storyboard for one my recent Bali audio slideshow Ngaben: Cremation Ceremony, which...

Amira Al-Sharif: Call For Photo Backers

Amira Al-Sharif was born in Saudi Arabia and currently lives in Yemen. Both of these are extremely conservative societies, and being a female photojournalist is practically unheard of. Amira has had to struggle for an education, and is the first person in her family to graduate from university. She attended The Foundry Photojournalism Workshop in Istanbul last June, and was the only representative of her native Yemen to be there. She not only loves...

Photo © Reem Al-Faisal-All Rights ReservedAn email newsletter from The Empty Quarter Gallery introduced me to Reem Al-Faisal who's a Saudi photographer. She started her career in 1994, and has exhibited her work in various galleries in Saudi Arabia, showcased at the Opera House in Cairo and at the University of Art and Design in Beijing. She also showed her works in various galleries in Germany, Spain,...

Cathy Scholl: Tribes of Rajasthan & Gujarat

Photo © Cathy Scholl-All Rights ReservedCathy Scholl is a photographer and a participant in my Tribes of Rajasthan & Gujarat Photo~Expedition, which took place earlier this year between January 23 and February 7, 2010. She has traveled to India no less than 13 times, as well as to Nepal, Bhutan, and Burma.Her photographs were exhibited in galleries throughout Southern California. In addition to...

I had to rejig my posts this past week to diversify the posts a bit, so I omitted some I had originally planned to feature. For the week starting Monday October 11, I have posts on:1. A poignant multimedia project involving the treatment of Women In India, which I planned to post last week.2. The work of a documentary photographer featuring daily life along the Ganges, that I also wanted to post last...

Alixandra Fazzina: UNCHR Interview

This interview is really worth watching and reflecting on.In July 2010, British photo-journalist Alixandra Fazzina was awarded the annual UNHCR Nansen Refugee Award as a recognition of her work documenting the often overlooked consequences of war. In this video by UNCHR, she speaks about the plight of the uprooted. She traveled to some of the worst hit areas in Pakistan where she saw first hand the devastation caused by the floods, and reminds...

Hmmmm.....that's interesting. Western Digital announced a free photo viewing application called WD Photos for the iPad that works with its line of external storage products like the My Book World Edition, My Book Live, and WD ShareSpace. The app is said to allow the user to access up to 285,000 images placed in a shared folder. The advantage in this is that saved images can be accessed using...

NPR: Tibet 100 Years Ago

Photo Courtesy Bonhams NPR's The Picture Show recently reported that a part of Tibet's history recorded through old photographs was auctioned in London. The photographs (consisting of 70 platinum prints and 2 folding panoramas) were taken by British political officer John Claude White during a 1903 British mission to Tibet, and were sold for £38,400 (or about $60,000).I love news like that because...

Jean-Marc Giboux: Holy Men

Photo © Jean-Marc Giboux -All Rights ReservedJean-Marc Giboux started his photographic career in 1988 in Los Angeles where he was a correspondent for the Gamma-Liaison photo agency covering news, social issues and cultural trends for European publications.In 1997, Giboux was awarded a grant from Rotary International to cover the progress of the worldwide polio eradication programs, traveling in India,...

I just read in WIRED's Gadget Lab that Zoom will launch a new Flip-like recorder that records beautiful audio for about $300. Stores expect it soon.Zoom is the Japanese company that manufactures the various audio recorders that are popular with many multimedia producers, and which recently announced the affordable H1 Handy Recorder that I posted about here.The plethora of useful (and others not so...

My Work: The Bali Trilogy

I'm glad to present Bali: The Trilogy; a three-part audio-slideshow (based on a chaptered SoundSlides platform), which consists of black & white documentaries of Balinese ceremonies.The Melasti ceremony is an all important Balinese tradition of purifying temple deities in the waters of the ocean, the Ngaben is the Balinese tradition of cremating the dead, while the third is Tajen, the ancient...

Justin Guariglia: A Leica Interview

Photo © Justin Guariglia-All Rights ReservedJustin Guariglia has had a lifelong passion for documentary photography and Leica M cameras that eventually led to a distinguished career as a magazine and travel photographer.He currently lives in Taipei, and was recently interviewed by the Leica Camera Blog, in which he says:"Of course, one cannot travel without money, and that is how I discovered photojournalism....

Faces of a Vanishing World: Joey Lawrence

I've posted a few times about Joey Lawrence (he also goes by Joey L), the young photographer who's been involved in commercial photography, photojournalism and music videos around the world by the age of 17, and who now has the established reputation of being a pioneer of new aged digital hyper-realistic photography, lighting and manipulation.Joey has released a documentary titled Faces of a Vanishing World available for purchase on DVD or as an...

POV: My Photo~Expeditions: Verdicts

Wade Laube is a photo editor, a photographer and an opinionated ranter (the two last descriptions make him a "my-kind-of-guy"), and he's penned an interesting post on his blog titled Buyer Beware of the Dodgy Workshop.He says this: "The travel industry has offered photography-themed holidays for years. Hobbyists spend their annual leave somewhere picturesque, get expert tuition and access to expensive...

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